


Bittersweet Loyalties

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Betrayal, Carthak, F/M, Jealousy, Love Triangle, Loyalty, Paranoia, References to Abusive Dynamics, Truth, envy - Freeform, references to violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 09:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17805260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Varice learns too late in her relationship with Ozorne that love cannot exist alongside jealousy, vengeance, and greed.





	Bittersweet Loyalties

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Peculiar Pairings Bingo event at Goldenlake.

Bittersweet Loyalties

Accusations of First Love

“Tell me what you think, Ozorne dear.” Varice spooned a sample of lemon custard made from a new recipe she was experimenting with into her oldest friend’s mouth as they say on a picnic blanket in the university gardens behind the greenhouses. 

Closing his eyes, Ozorne chewed on the custard Varice had served him. On tenterhooks how her newest creation had turned out, Varice stared at him with wide blue lotus eyes as he seemed to slide the dessert along his tongue, stroking out the complexities and contradictions of its rich flavor. 

“What’s your verdict?” Varice pressed, hating how her heart hammered in anticipation of his answer when he had been silent for too long. 

“It needs more lemony tartness.” Ozorne’s lips pursed. “It’s too sweet like its creator.” 

“I don’t know what you mean by that.” Varice, baffled and hurt by this sudden insult to her character, blinked. 

“You’ve kissed Arram, haven’t you?” Ozorne’s harsh demand reminiscent of a growling guard dog reminded Varice how jealous—how possessive—he could be of people and things he regarded as his. Apparently he saw her as his and Arram who had stolen her affections from him. 

“I have.” Varice wanted to meet Ozorne’s glare with a defiant one of her own but instead found her gaze dropping to the picnic blanket, her dignity eclipsed as always by the desperate need to heal his bruised pride. “I’ve kissed many boys beside Arram, though, you know.” 

“I don’t care about those boys.” Ozorne made a dismissive gesture as if those boys were pesky mosquitoes to be swatted at whim. “You never loved those boys but you love Arram, don’t you? He’s your first love, isn’t he?” 

“I don’t know.” Varice’s cheeks burned like embers. 

“Liar.” Abruptly Ozorne was too close—his mere proximity radiating danger. He seized her wrist in a vise-grip. Almost spitting in her face, he snapped, “Tell the truth. You love Arram more than me, don’t you?” 

“You’re hurting me.” Varice cried, and Ozorne released her swiftly as if her words had scorched him. 

“I’d never.” Ozorne sounded so appalled—so guilty—at his own brutality that he could only deny it rather than acknowledge or apologize for it. “Varice, you know I’d never hurt you.” 

That was a prettier fantasy than the reality of the black-and-purple marks she knew would decorate her wrist like jewels on a golden bangle the next morning. She had always taken refuge in beautiful, comforting lies when the truth of Ozorne’s tempers and jealousies became too ugly for her to bear. 

“I know,” she whispered, tenderly massaging her swelling wrist and lying to herself as much as to him. To calm the situation before he found a reason to hurt her again, she went on, “Even if Arram is my first love, he can’t replace you, Ozorne. You were my first friend here when everyone thought I was a freak. I’ll always remember that.” 

“Everyone thought we were both freaks.” Ozorne snorted, and Varice couldn’t figure out if his contempt was for her or for the masses of university students who had scorned him, a proud prince of Carthak. “Now they think you’re charming while I’m still a freak albeit one nearer to the throne.” 

“You aren’t a freak.” Varice reached out tentative fingers to softly squeeze his. “You’re so clever and talented that not everybody can appreciate you.” 

“You’re too sweet for your own good with Arram and me.” Scowling a warning, Ozorne yanked his hand away from hers. “You’ll have to decide whether you want to be sweet with Arram or with me.” 

Loyalties Lie

Varice had never heeded Ozorne’s possessive and paranoid outbursts about dividing her loyalties between him and Arram—dismissing them as mad rants that would be forgotten when his latest bout of insanity ended—until Ozorne locked Arram into the empire vilest dungeons on charges of terrible, utterly unfathomable treason. 

She wept into her pillows imagining the tortures—magical and otherwise—Arram would be subjected to as he was questioned by Ozorne’s most ruthless interrogators. She wished she could plead for clemency on Arram’s behalf but that would only increase Ozorne’s fury by enflaming his jealousy for her. If she begged mercy for Arram, she would be beaten and locked in her own cell, she was sickeningly certain. 

“You’re too sweet, my lovely Lady Varice.” Ozorne grabbed her chin, tilted her face to his, and licked the tears from her cheeks. As Varice wondered why he didn’t taste the salty bitterness ripping through her like a tidal wave, he clicked his tongue chidingly. “You weep even for an unrepentant traitor.” 

Varice, tense as a hunted antelope in too close proximity to a prowling lion and afraid to betray her dangerous sympathies to Ozorne’s most despised prisoner, remained quiet as a picked bone. 

“Yet you are perhaps unwise to weep for a traitor.” Ozorne’s tongue teased her lips until she gave a broken gasp of grief. “One who doesn’t know you as well as I might believe you were a traitor yourself, questioning whether your loyalties lie with the loathsome villain in my cells or with me.” 

“My loyalties have always lain with you.” Varice didn’t protest as he slid her silk sleeves along her arms, exposing her breasts to the excesses of his passions. “Arram betrayed me as much as he did you when he committed treason against you and Carthak.” 

“Did he?” Ozorne pinched at her nipple until she nodded fervently, tears of shame shining like diamonds on her trembling eyelashes. Then he began stroking the sharp pain away with suddenly tender fingertips. “Then we must comfort one another in our sorrows, my dearest.” 

His hands drifted below her waist, pushing her dress above her hips. She opened her legs for Ozorne as she had so many times for Arram, but where Arram had been gentle and sometimes clumsy entering her, Ozorne was rough and greedily demanding everything from her. Arram, she thought with a moan as Ozorne bit blood from her shoulder, had made sweet love with her, but Ozorne was determined to claim her—to mark her as his own. 

Know the Truth

“Soon we shall know the truth of what afflicts our precious birds.” Ozorne, speaking in the royal plural even when he was alone with Varice in his bed, tangled his fingers in her blonde hair. “Our regal cousins Jonathan and Thayet of Tortall have graciously suggested that an animal mage from their kingdom might be able to cure our beloved birds as a gesture of good will between our peoples.” 

“Many great animal mages have tried and failed to heal your birds.” Varice was still cowed by the memory of the many mages Ozorne had punished for failing to cure his birds, accusing them of complicity in a plot to poison his dear birds. The king and queen of Tortall must not have realized how perilous it was to give an emperor as prone to seeing treachery in every shadow as Ozorne false hope. 

“This will be different.” Ozorne tugged Varice’s hair out of its elaborate style. “The animal mage in question has been trained by one Arram Draper.” 

Varice gasped at the familiar name even as part of her berated herself for betraying any feeling at the mention of a man who had once been her friend and lover when it would have been safer and smarter to remain silent and expressionless as marble. 

“She is young enough that Arram insists on accompanying her to our court,” Ozorne continued, twisting Varice’s golden hair around his fingers as a courtier would spin elegant lies, and Varice thought with a lightning flash of jealousy that Arram must truly love his student if he was willing to risk returning to Carthak on her behalf when he had been lucky to escape with his life. “In understanding of that, I have granted a pardon to Arram Draper on the condition that he engage in no further treason. If he acts against our throne again, we will, of course, be forced to execute him. We might be moved to mercy once but never twice.” 

“Arram wouldn’t dare take advantage of your mercy.” Varice was consumed with kissing Ozorne before it occurred to her with a shiver she tried to pass off as desire that she had been separated from Arram for too long to know what he would or wouldn’t do. 

Give Everything

“What will you give me if I pardon Arram, my dove?” Ozorne cupped Varice’s chin in his palm as she knelt before him in a private audience, pleading tearfully for him to grant clemency to Arram. 

“Everything.” Varice could feeling the makeup peeling beneath her eyes and streaking down her cheeks. Mentally she cursed herself for her woeful lack of grace when she most needed to charm her emperor. “I’d give you everything and deny you nothing.” 

“If you are loyal and not a traitor like the criminal you so ardently defend”—Ozorne’s thumb pushed against her lips—“then you should have already given everything you have to Carthak and to me.” 

“I have.” Varice chanced gazing deep into Ozorne’s eyes, willing him to remember all the time she had given herself to him in a swirl of silk blankets and pillows. “I’ve never desired anything expect to serve you and Carthak.” 

“You desired Arram.” Ozorne’s face twisted in wrath and envy. “Beg for your life and I might spare yours but never Arram’s.” 

“Please.” Varice, still reluctant to surrender the last hope of saving Arram, pressed her palms together as if in prayer. “What is the point of killing Arram? The foreign powers will fear your might all the more if you prove strong enough to show mercy to Arram.” 

“I won’t even grant Arram the mercy of a quick death”—Ozorne’s eyes glinted with the cold hardness of the tiles on the floor of his throne room—“and you can watch to learn the end traitors can expect in my empire. Consider it a reminder of your loyalties, my dear. The gods demand blood payment for treason and so do I. I’m no lesser than a god after all.” 

“As Your Imperial Majesty commands.” Faint at heart, Varice collapsed against the pitiless tiles, realizing that whatever love she had once felt for Ozorne was dead as Arram would soon be, killed by the torture he had derived such vindictive pleasure from inflicting on her and Arram. Love, she recognized too late, could never exist alongside jealousy, vengeance, and greed. Ozorne had never truly loved her, and her own love for him had been stifled by fear before it could blossom into anything beautiful.


End file.
